SHIRLEY VALENTINE. To 26 February.

Hornchurch

SHIRLEY VALENTINE
by Willy Russell

Queen's Theatre To 26 February 2005
Tue-Sat 8pm Mat 26 Feb 2.30pm
Audio-described 26 Feb 2.30pm
Runs 2hr 10min One interval

TICKETS: 01708 443333
www.queens-theatre.co.uk
Review: Timothy Ramsden 23 February

Self-educating Shirley gets a good outing.She cooks, she cleans, she starts a new life; those are the adventures of 42-year old Scouse housewife Shirley Bradshaw who rediscovers the child, the pre-marital Shirley Valentine still within herself. Unlike Willy Russell's most famous earlier creation, open-university Rita, Shirley has neither job nor later-in-life education. She has to discover it all within herself. While talking to the wall. And to the fourth wall, that's us, the audience.

Carol Sloman (directed tactfully by Caroline Eves) makes Shirley's Merseyside existence a matter of habituation. She's truly bound by the kitchen walls, auto-bumping the drawers shut with her backside. Or this self-described St Joan of the Fitted Units gives the units' doorknobs a casual polish while chatting about life. It's Russell's version of Anton Chekhov, humdrum daily routine going on (the egg and chips cooked onstage provoked one spectator's applause) while matters of life, death, of living and partly living find expression in her extended soliloquy.

She's resilient, is Shirley, with more open contempt for a feminist acquaintance than for her husband Joe. Even by the end she's willing to meet him again - his anger provoked by his own life, making him an adult version of a pupil in Russell's Our Day Out.

But Joe won't recognise her in her Grecian incarnation. Between the consolatory opening glass of white wine and the celebratory one at the close, Sloman's tall, dignified figure has transformed to uprightness and openness. It's matched by her chrysalis-like change from dowdy daily wear, through bright going-away suit to the casual beachwear her bronzed figure wears in Greece. Where, as if she's carrying other's aspirations, she has the silk robe slipped her by apparently pretentious neighbour Gillian.

The play's about Shirley's lost years; she repeatedly discovers possibilities of friendship long concealed within apparently hostility. Sloman captures a sense of freedom in her smile and moments of sudden reflection. Shirley's clearly a bright lass and the thread of fine jokes adds to the optimism embedded in the character. However bound-down she is at first, there's always a human spirit in there, as this fine performance makes clear.

Shirley Valentine: Carol Sloman

Director: Caroline Eves
Designer: Rodney Ford
Lighting: Paul Kenah
Voice coach: Edda Sharpe

2005-02-25 09:08:58